[SLUG] Have I destroyed my system?

[luke.kendall@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]

Re: [SLUG] How to install about 150 rpms?

On 11 Feb, Tom Massey replied to:
>  > Well, I feel like taking a gamble and seeing whether this breaks my 
>  > entire system or not, so I'll try it.... 
>   
>  Um, that may not be a great idea. This assumes that the packages you 
>  have in your temporary directory fulfil all the requirements that all 
>  the other packages in that directory depend on. This may not be the 
>  case. Generally it's safer in this situation to do an rpm -Uvh *.rpm 
>  and try and fulfil the dependencies that rpm complains about before 
>  you start playing with --force or --nodeps. Searching on 
>  <http://rpmfind.net> can often find rpms that satisfy these 
>  dependencies. As a generality, with an rpm based system, if you find 
>  yourself using --nodeps or --force, you've probably done something 
>  wrong. Those options should really only be used, for example, by people 
>  who've installed the needed dependencies from source and so skipped 
>  adding them to the rpm database. There are reasons that rpm's have 
>  dependencies, there are reasons that the rpm program has --nodeps and 
>  --force flags. Installing potentially unstable software is not one of 
>  them. Well, actually it is. But only if you're willing to poke at the 
>  instability until it becomes at least as stable as a badly cooked 
>  blancmange. 

Looks like Tom was 100% right.

I now have a bunch of programs that are running, but almost any
other program will dump core.  Including things like su or login.

ldconfig reported that /usr/bin/libglib.so didn't exist, for example,
so I think I'm screwed.

Although I'm logged in, and even have a root shell, I suspect things
are too broken to recover from easily.  Will I have to re-install?

I'm running RH 7.1; perhaps a way to recover would be to get a RH 7.2
CD and upgrade?  I also have a Tom's root boot disc, and also one of
those Linuxcare recovery CD-ettes (v 1.2).  But I'm just hanging back
from shutting down until I get some advice.

Pity I hadn't hung back from doing the rpm forcing.  Live and learn.

Any advice?

luke